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About Delegation Part -1

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Hello again everyone and hope you’re doing fine. Welcome to the first part of my new discussion topic. Today I am going to discuss about the Objective-C protocols and delegates. Anybody new to Objective-C is well aware of the hassle of understanding the concept of delegation. I have heard a lot of people bragging about how complex the concept is to them. Well, me myself had a tough time understanding it. But when you come to understand, you will feel how well this concept makes sense. And of course object oriented programming is all about how you feel about the code and how it comes to make sense, isn’t it?

Well going on to the business, first of all we need to know what is an Objective-C protocol, right? In Objective-C you see some class whose names are written inside the angle brackets (). For example if you go to UIView’s interface, you will see:

These are called protocols. The class mentioning the protocols inside the angle brackets adopts these protocols. It is like signing a contract with these classes. You adopt a protocol; you sign a contract with the protocol class that in your class you have to implement some methods of the protocol (you’re bound to it by the contract, unless of course if the methods are not optional, but we’ll discuss that later).

Protocols define a group of methods that are not associated with any particular class. In the above example UIView class implements a group of methods defined by NSCoding, UIAppearance and UIAppearanceContainer. Since Objective-C supports only single inheritance, protocols are often used to achieve the same goals as multiple inheritance in other languages.

Protocols aren’t mandatory to define new classes, but you’ll find them used quite a lot when developing a real app. The most common use of protocols is with del- egates; which is our main topic today.

We all have been through some situation where we don’t know how to do a particular job, true? Remember how we overcame from that? Yes, either we learnt the process all by our self or, we had someone to help us. In Objective–C, that some one is called delegate. Cocoa touch has this design pattern called delegation, that helps your app’s system classes that don’t know what you want to do! How? Very simple, you introduce someone who knows what to do, that “who” is called a delegate. You introduce one object to another object that’s able to answer any questions. By assigning a delegate, you provide links into code that can respond to requests and state changes. The actual protocols for delegation are usually suffixed with Delegate.

Whoa!!!I hope you understood the theoretical concept of delegation. If you haven’t, don’t worry! You’ll have a clear knowledge when we go through this concept more with a practical example in the next part. Until then have a nice time and happy coding folks!!! 🙂